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I Think This Is How You Were

by SARAH AMANDOLARE

There is something to be said for a person who requests a name change as a child, and for whom such a request ends up sticking. What there is to say about my Aunt Ginger, I’m still figuring out. But this year on the Fourth of July, I was not in the United States, and thoughts of her seemed the only way to compensate for the lack of fireworks and charcoal grills.

She was born Camille, to an Italian-American family of all boys. She was bright and pretty, with long, slender limbs and big brown eyes. She loved her preschool teacher’s name, Ginger, and so they started calling her that instead.

Aunt Ginger was a secretary or some type of office assistant for most of my life. She lived somewhere in Westchester and took shopping trips to Lord and Taylor and Bloomingdales with my grandmother. They always wore heels and jewelry, sprayed themselves with perfume and carried tubes of matte lipstick in their leather purses. They reused the shopping bags when they visited my family, filling the bags with silver trays of lasagna and sugar cookies. These were things my grandmother made because everyone knew Aunt Ginger did not cook. Could she cook? We weren’t sure.

When I was 14, we found out. Aunt Ginger got married. She was in her 60s and her new husband was even older. He had white hair and limped a little, and his skin was disarmingly soft and saggy when he hugged us. We called him John, never Uncle John, and we liked that he was more Irish than Italian. He grew up eating mutton, had fought in a war and loved to tell stories about all of it. Aunt Ginger often seemed embarrassed by him, but he had lots of money. She stopped working as a secretary and started cooking. I remember only one meal and there were carrots, steamed and unsalted.

There is a photo of Aunt Ginger, which I found stuffed inside one of our family albums. It was taken in our backyard long before my grandparents died, before Aunt Ginger had to start dying her hair brown. In this photo her feet are bare, and she’s running across our backyard. It is summertime and she is smiling. She’s wearing a lightweight blouse with short sleeves, and a skirt that falls just below her knees.

I am alone here in Prague and aware that most of my encounters with people who speak English must come across as desperate and a touch unhinged. Each time I find someone willing to spend more than ten minutes with me, I’ve found I have to fight the urge to blurt out, "My aunt died this summer." I haven’t figured out what I’ll say next, so I somehow always manage to keep this all to myself.
Nobody here has any idea who she was, or how chemo and radiation and a large tumor in her esophagus quickly replaced how attractive and energetic and irritatingly hyper she was just one year ago.

The second sentence could be, "I found out two days after it happened. My mom didn’t want to tell me the day of, because that was also the day before I was leaving for a real vacation." The third sentence would probably bring me to tears, but I’m doing such an excellent job of not saying the first sentence.
I didn’t find out until I was in Italy, the day after I’d sent Aunt Ginger a postcard. She was in the hospital, so I’d addressed it to my parents’ house. "Please read this to Aunt Ginger for me," I’d written. Then I wrote that I thought of her often, and that I missed her smile and laugh. It felt awkwardly intimate, in a way that only surfaces when people are sick. I sent it anyway.

On the phone my mom couldn’t speak very well. "I’m having a really hard time talking about this," she said in a surprised voice, as if she shouldn’t have felt so affected by Aunt Ginger’s death, or had any trouble at all telling me about it. But I understand, I think, my mom’s struggle.

Aunt Ginger was my dad’s sister. It is hard to admit this now but all of us, my dad included, regarded her presence and her phone calls with knowing looks that fell somewhere between an eye-roll and an exasperated sigh. When we hosted holiday dinners, she’d linger in the kitchen and, seemingly oblivious to the stresses of "entertaining," attempt witty banter or drone on and on about an interaction with her neighbor or a failed casserole. Meanwhile, my parents would be bustling between the stove and the sink, occasionally sneaking sips of wine and giving each other the knowing looks.

But that is family: you hate them and love them, need them and wish they’d disappear. When they finally do, it’s as simple as a nightmare. You cannot remember how this all started and you wonder whether you willed it to end. You question what all of this – the hospital visits and phone calls to nursing homes requesting beds – was really for. You think maybe Aunt Ginger was some sort of omen, a sign that you haven’t been paying close enough attention to anything, and that more things will fall away without asking your permission first.

The last time I saw her was Thanksgiving 2009. I rode the subway from Brooklyn to the Bronx, and then took a five-minute bus ride to a place called Calvary Hospital, which is perhaps the most depressing place I’ve ever seen in my life. Advanced cancer patients are sent to Calvary for things like "end of life care," a term my parents refused, in their own quiet way, to really accept.

"It’s become more of a long-term care facility. Calvary has this awful connotation, but really its meaning has changed," my mom, a lifelong nurse, said once.

"People hear Calvary and they think ‘a place where you go to die’ but it’s really not like that anymore," my dad said.

I missed my stop, but when I told the bus driver I was trying to go to Calvary, he softened. He let me off next to a McDonalds at a traffic light, and pointed in the direction of the hospital. "It’s a short walk," he said.

When I found my aunt’s room it was around 2 p.m., and my brother was there, eating a big plate of free Thanksgiving dinner from the hospital cafeteria. "It’s pretty good," he said, shoveling mashed up vegetables into his mouth. My sister had come up from Boston, which was important because she can smile through anything. The TV was on in the room and my parents’ eyes were shifting between it, the window overlooking the other side of the hospital building, and my aunt, tiny and tired in her hospital gown. She was lying in bed, hooked up to all of the usual tubes, and the tumor made it difficult for her to speak. We hugged and she smiled. I tried not to think about the photo of her in our backyard. I said hello to John.

Eight years ago, Aunt Ginger’s parents died the same weekend. When they each passed away, neither was aware that the other was in the hospital. The pneumonia they’d both fallen ill with made reality a far off place.

Things moved quickly after my grandmother got sick. She was admitted to a hospital, where she continually asked for my grandfather. "Where’s Lou?" she demanded every few minutes. We kept saying he would be stopping by later. What we didn’t say was that he’d gotten sick, too, and was now in a hospital room just below hers. Before long, they were too tired to ask for each other.

If it sounds complicated, that’s because it was. My father and his siblings, understandably, wanted to protect their 92-and 93-year-old parents from further stress, but keeping it all a secret, understandably, felt uncomfortable for the rest of us.

At my grandparents’ wake, I made frequent trips to the bathroom, pretending to fix my hair or put on Chapstick. While I was standing before the mirror, my Aunt Ginger came up and stood beside me. Her eyes were extremely serious, and her features had hardened from hours of consoling others, explaining how this had all happened to people who’d come to the wake from out of town.

"You have to be strong," she said stiffly and confidently to her own reflection before taking a very deep breath, turning and walking out of the bathroom.

I told my dad about the mirrored pep talk last summer, after the doctors had revealed the severity of my aunt’s tumor. I was on a street in Brooklyn near my apartment on a hot day, clutching my cell phone with my sweaty hand. My dad was talking about the hardest part of all of it: for the past several years, a tube affixed with a tiny camera had been shoved down Aunt Ginger’s esophagus because of her acid reflux, but these tests had somehow missed the cancer. A tumor the size of a baseball was now pushing against my aunt’s lung, and the cancer had made its way into her shoulder bone, a bad sign.

I was staring straight ahead at the passing cars and people sipping iced coffees when my dad said that it was all "so unfair," something I never thought I’d hear him say, even though his only sister was very sick. Without saying so explicitly, my dad had instilled in me the idea that unfairness is something you work hard to reverse, not something you talk about. It isn’t a rule I’m often able to follow.

"She’s very strong," I told him, after recounting the bathroom incident, even though I wasn’t really sure of Aunt Ginger’s strength at all. My dad paused, and then said, "Yes, she is. She’s been very calm about all of this."

When people are dying, you’ll do almost anything to find a bright side, bend over backwards to make them stronger than what they are, tell yourself stories to forget the severity of the present.

My grandfather worked as a commercial artist, illustrating department store catalogues and advertisements. He also drew and painted – funny things that my grandmother hated. A motley assortment of his work ended up hanging in our house: a penciled headshot of the actor Rudolf Valentino, a watercolor pirate ship sailing past a setting sun, an oil painting of a turban-wearing African man, and a Thanksgiving greeting card.

When Aunt Ginger saw a painting she liked, of a pretty woman strolling down a pastel-shaded street, my grandfather recreated it, but made the woman look just like her. He set it in an elegant frame, like one you’d see hanging at an upscale dentist’s office. We were all very impressed, and also reminded of our long-suffering Lou, who quietly appeased his high-maintenance wife and his often-thankless daughter.

On one of her last visits with Aunt Ginger, my mom told her that I was going to Italy, and this had made my aunt very pleased.

"I think she knew, you know. I think they know," my mom told me over the phone.

I was in Bologna in a narrow hotel room, talking quietly on Skype with my headphones on, hoping the front desk people sitting within ten feet of my room weren’t listening in and mocking my American sentimentality.  

It was such a vague thing to say. Knew what, exactly? Who is "they?" Are "they" the dying? I didn’t and don’t allow myself to think too much about these questions, utilizing the same defensive muscles that have kept me from telling people here in Prague that my aunt died this summer. I prefer to think of the photo in the backyard – it was reality once, too, a kinder, gentler one that might as well have been the Fourth of July.

Sarah Amandolare is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Prague. You can find her previous work here. She twitters here.

"You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" - Shawn Colvin (mp3)

"You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" - Bob Dylan (mp3)

"You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" - Elvis Costello (mp3)

 

Comments

[Noam Sane]

Sad and beautiful, like life.